The English Cottage GAAAADEN......

Long before I ever dreamed of going to England, I loved the English Cottage Garden. Pictures of these gardens nestled next to an old cottage intrigued me. Appearing a bit overgrown, you just knew there were many treasures hidden there to be discovered. Once I stepped foot on English soil with camera in hand, the search began. The first couple of days in London yielded little in the way of flora. The streets were crowded with traffic, sidewalks were in motion with fit pedestrians and cyclists. Buildings were connected along the streets with no available space for a garden. My search continued. On day three, the coach took us through the countryside enroute to our next destination. Fields could be seen for miles, separated by dry stone walls and a few trees. The view was like a patchwork quilt with fields of yellow, dark green, bluish green and then poppies scattered along the way.

Making our way into Cotswold a smaller town, gardens began to surface. Most residences had small quaint courtyard type gardens like those in Charleston, SC. Though beautiful, they were not the Cottage Gardens I had seen in books and on film. After a bit of touring and shopping it was on to Stratford, home of William Shakespeare and wife Anne Hathaway. A trip to Anne's Cottage didn't sound that exciting. We pulled up, stepped off the coach and entered...... Eden. There alongside the beautiful thatched cottage was "the Garden". Roses, poppies, sweet peas, vegetables, Lupine and so much more. I quickly spotted a large robust Cardoon and remembered my struggling one at home. The soil was fertile and the plants large and healthy.

I wanted to spend the day exploring. I spotted two curiosities. One was a living willow hut, complete with wooden bench and relief from the summer sun. The other was a device used I presume to scare rabbits and other pests from the garden. It was a withered potato stuck with feathers and dangling on a string. Simple enough. There is never enough time to spend in a Cottage garden.

Hurriedly we toured the house and ended up, as all tours do, in the gift shop. Among the trinkets, I found seed packets filled with sweet peas grown in the cottage garden. The seeds were purchased and tucked away for safe keeping. Though we discovered treasures of a different kind the rest of the week, we did not see another Cottage Garden to rival Anne's. When the week ended and we returned to the airport for our trip home, I remembered the seeds tucked safely in my luggage. Daringly I marked nothing to declare on my customs form, when asked if I was bringing any seed back to the U.S. Those were treasures I intended to keep even though admittedly I perspired when the woman in front of me set off an alarm and was practically violated in a pat down. I envisioned a scruffy baggage handler finding the hidden seed, alerting security and the result would be my placement on a "no fly" list with some prison time added in. That didn't happen and now I'm ready to grow those sweetpeas in my own Cottage Garden. Now all I need is the Cottage.